There is a real danger that the United Nations could take over the Internet.

Last week, the U.S. Department of Commerce announced that it was not going to renew its contract with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) which now controls the assignment of domain names.

Nobody knows how the ICANN functions will be performed in the future.

Waiting in the wings is the U.N. which tried to take over the Internet in 2012 at a meeting in Dubai where Russia and China tried to delegate control to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) an organization founded in 1895 that regulates long distance telephone lines and satellite orbits. The U.S. and Europe objected to the treaty which was negotiated in Dubai since it gave governments the power to assign domain names, get the actual names of the people involved in each site, censor web content, and charge fees for access to international sites.

A treaty was signed by 83 largely authoritarian states but the U.S. and Europe wouldn’t sign.

The ITU is run by Hamadoun Touré, a native of Mali who was educated in Lenningrad and Moscow in the 1980s and by Houlin Zhao, from China. The danger that communist-like control could be exerted over the Internet is very, very great.

Please sign this petition to keep the Internet free and to block UN efforts at controlling it. We must act now to stop the UN takeover.